Documents, spreadsheets, and slides are how administrations, schools, and firms actually work. Most of that stack still runs through a handful of proprietary suites — desktop first, then cloud — that decide where files live, who can open them, and which formats stay “compatible”. Convenience is real; so is dependence on vendors that extract licence rent while routing everyday writing through infrastructure you neither own nor can inspect.

NGI-funded work in this area is not one drop-in suite. It covers collaborative editing in the browser, end-to-end encrypted pads and forms, embeddable spreadsheets, presentation experiments, and LibreOffice-based online stacks you can run closer to your own devices. None of these projects alone replaces every Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant overnight. Together they show that core productivity tools need not require permanent lock-in to a single black box.

Sticky themes below split the stack the way people use it:

• Docs — text, notes, forms, ODF/PDF pipelines
• Sheets — spreadsheets and embeddable grids
• Present — slides and live presentation tools

Format and identity lock-in. Default save paths, macros, and “only opens correctly in …” behaviour keep organisations on one vendor’s file graph. Leaving means a migration project, not a preference toggle.

Cloud as the only collaboration path. Real-time co-editing is sold as a reason to put every draft on someone else’s servers. Metadata — who edited what, when, from which network — becomes a product feature.

Public money, private choke point. A single company has extracted billions of euros from public and private buyers for decades, first with legacy desktop tools and now with cloudified suites, while carrying a long track record of privacy convictions and anticompetitive enforcement actions.

No sober fallback. A country or organisation that cannot run basic internal writing and calculation outside one vendor’s stack puts itself at grave operational risk. Schools amplify the same lock-in for the next generation (see Social media in schools).

Dominant proprietary actors today:

• Microsoft 365 / Office — documents, sheets, slides, notes
• Google Workspace / Apps — documents, sheets, slides, notes
• Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — documents, sheets, slides

Waiting for a better Microsoft privacy whitepaper does not give you an OpenDocument default, and it does not survive a licence shock or a jurisdiction change. Practical alternatives exist now: LibreOffice on the desktop, Collabora and ZetaOffice in the browser, CryptPad for encrypted collaboration, IronCalc for embeddable sheets, and NGI experiments for presentations and block editors.

The European Commission’s own administration went to court against the European Data Protection Supervisor after the Supervisor said that using Microsoft 365 breaks EU data-protection law. The right next step is the opposite of a lawsuit: treat leaving Microsoft as a top job, and put steady public money into free office tools (Free Software Foundation Europe (2026) ‘The FSFE calls for Free Software as the model for digital public services’. — see Sources). Digital sovereignty talk without an office migration plan is rhetoric (Electronic Frontier Foundation (2026) ‘Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, What It Could Be’.).

The projects in this dossier each target specific harms of proprietary office lock-in. None replaces every suite overnight, but together they show inspectable collaboration, encrypted pads, embeddable calculation, and LibreOffice-based online editing:

	Collabora Online brings LibreOffice into the browser for collaborative documents, sheets, and slides — with visual search improvements under the NGI grant.
	ZetaOffice runs collaborative LibreOffice editing client-side in the browser with end-to-end encryption — the grant formerly linked as LibreOffice P2P.
	CryptPad adds secure surveys and polls on top of CryptPad’s end-to-end encrypted pads, sheets, and kanban — data stays ciphertext on the server.
	IronCalc is an embeddable spreadsheet engine in Rust — formulas and grids you can host without a Microsoft or Google sheet account.
	TypeCell is a CRDT-based collaborative block editor for notes and structured writing without a proprietary doc silo.
	Wax extends the Wax editor with ODF, legacy office formats, and PDF — publishing workflows that stay on open formats.
	Slipshow explores a different presentation paradigm, including flipchart-style annotations suited to teaching and live talks.
	SimplyPresent (SimplyEdit Spaces) targets collaborative presentations with CRDT sync instead of a vendor slide cloud.

Browse the NGI-funded projects below — including ZetaOffice (collaborative, client-side LibreOffice in the browser with encryption).

Beyond NGI grants, LibreOffice remains the main full desktop office suite in the commons. It is the practical fallback many organisations can install today while NGI-funded online and collaborative pieces mature.

LibreOffice remains the full desktop suite in the commons: Writer, Calc, Impress, and related tools on the OpenDocument Format — the practical fallback many organisations can install today.

No single tool here replaces Microsoft 365 for every workflow. Choose the risk you actually have:

• Desktop fallback today → LibreOffice (Writer / Calc / Impress)
• Collaborative docs in the browser → Docs (Collabora Online, ZetaOffice, CryptPad, TypeCell, Wax)
• Spreadsheets without a sheet silo → Sheets (IronCalc, Collabora, CryptPad, ZetaOffice)
• Presentations and live talks → Present (Slipshow, SimplyPresent, Collabora, ZetaOffice)
• Policy / public sector → install libre alternatives as immediate fallback; fund missing features; enforce open standards; keep schools on open educational resources so lock-in is not the default for the next cohort

Office software is too important to leave to a handful of vendors. Even a small share of what is now spent on proprietary licences would pay for better commons tools. There is still no dedicated long-term budget for that — only small grants from open calls at NLnet under Next Generation Internet.

• Saura, G., Casas, J. and Arguelho, M. (2026) ‘Digital sovereignty as a political and economic struggle: the state and social movements in education’, Learning, Media and Technology. doi:10.1080/17439884.2026.2692954 (online 24 June 2026; the publisher PDF is not free, so we link the DOI only).
• Free Software Foundation Europe (2026) ‘The FSFE calls for Free Software as the model for digital public services’. Available at: fsfe.org (Accessed: 21 September 2026).
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (2026) ‘Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, What It Could Be’. Available at: eff.org (Accessed: 21 September 2026).